The New York Times: Picture a leader. Is she a woman?

Originally found at New York Times, by Heather Murphy

Tina Kiefer, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, fell upon the exercise accidentally, while leading a workshop full of executives who did not speak much English. Since then it has been adopted by organizational psychologists across the world.

“Even when the drawings are gender neutral,” which is uncommon, Dr. Kiefer said in an email, “the majority of groups present the drawing using language that indicates male (he) rather than neutral or female.”

And yet, her clients often insisted that what they meant by “he” is actually “both.”

Several researchers in organizational psychology who have had a similar experience with this exercise decided to investigate further. How might holding unconscious assumptions about gender affect people’s abilities to recognize emerging leadership? What they found, in a study posted by the Academy of Management Journal, seems to confirm what many women have long suspected: getting noticed as a leader in the workplace is more difficult for women than for men. Even when a man and a woman were reading the same words off a script, only the man’s leadership potential was recognized.

Continue reading the original article at The New York Times.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Elizabeth J. McClean, University of Arizona
• Sean R. Martin, University of Virginia
• Kyle J. Emich, University of Delaware
• Col. Todd Woodruff, United States Military Academy at West Point